In 2024, $590 of our school tax paid for a developer's tax break

One sentence from the State Comptroller runs this whole page: "Every exemption granted on a property shifts the tax burden to the non-exempt properties." It holds for the senior exemption this project has spent five months on, and it holds for abatements many times its size.

The senior exemption under RPTL §467 moved about $304,000 of school tax in 2025-26, measured on 49 of the 60 class-1 parcels that hold it, or about $372,000 if the other eleven class-1 parcels, whose exempt value cannot be cleanly isolated, resemble them. Seventy-one parcels district-wide hold the exemption, out of 6,327; the eleven outside class 1 are in neither dollar figure. Four of the five abatement projects moved $4,542,118 in the fiscal year ending December 31, 2024 (ledger). That is more than twelve times as much, taking the senior figure at its upper bound.

This page does not propose reducing the senior exemption and neither does this project. The ask there has always been that an expansion carry a price tag, and the test every proposal here passes is unchanged: a senior who never moves is left exactly as they are today.

Every figure below is the fiscal year ending December 31, 2024, as reported by the two agencies to the Authorities Budget Office and published by the State (data.ny.gov, Industrial Development Agencies' Project Data). Names and addresses are as filed, and where the county assessment roll differs it is noted in the table. Planned end years are self-reported by the filing agency and are not verified here. Every row reproduces to the dollar, and the roll independently confirms which agency holds which project (ledger). That is the same filing year as the right-hand end of the chart above, whose levy baseline for that point is the school year ending June 30, 2024.

The subtraction is the Authorities Budget Office's own convention: net exemptions equals total exemptions minus total payments made. It reproduces on all forty-four rows of the filing. The five net figures in that column are in the ledger. Rock 50 LLC reports $0 of school tax exemption, and the only benefit it reports is a $46,312 mortgage recording tax exemption. The assessment roll nonetheless shows its parcel carrying the IDA exemption code with school taxable value of zero, which puts its unreported school benefit at about $509,000 a year at the district's residual rate. That is item 1 in section 06, not an allegation.

What has changed since this filing. The table is fiscal year 2024, the most recent year the State publishes. The district has since said that the larger AvalonBay agreement ended in the 2025-26 school year and that a new agreement at a different property was recently approved, with revenue to the district beginning in 2026-27. So the figures here are what the last published year measured, not a reading of this month, and the net direction will not be visible in the State feed until the 2025 and 2026 filings appear. The district's numbers are revenue it receives and are not the same measure as the school payment column above; the two must not be netted against each other. Item 2 in section 07 carries the detail and what would settle it.

The highlighted column is that row's net shift carried by class 1, which pays 74.05% of the school levy (ledger), divided across the district's 5,698 class-1 parcels (derivation). It is what the average single-family home in this district pays so that parcel does not. Those four together come to about $49 a month, every month, on the average bill.

Two of the five projects are housing, and the split between the agencies falls exactly along that line. The Nassau County IDA holds two projects here and both are housing: the Rockville Centre Housing Authority with Omni Housing Development, and Rockville Mill River. Together they shift $1,113,352, or 24.5% of the $4,542,118. The Town of Hempstead IDA holds the other three, and its total is $3,428,766, which is the entire remainder. The two figures are not an estimate of each other. They are the same partition read two ways.

One of the two housing projects is sponsored by the housing authority chartered for this village, a separate public benefit corporation under the Public Housing Law. The other is a Mill River rental development. The affordability terms sit in the projects' regulatory agreements, which this page has not obtained, so the classification here is by sponsor, not by a verified income restriction. This page does not ask for either project to end, and sets both aside rather than counting them against the district (ledger).

Two boards, neither elected, and they answer to different people. The Nassau County IDA has seven members appointed by the County Executive and confirmed by the County Legislature. The Town of Hempstead IDA has seven appointed by the Town Supervisor, and the county Legislature has no part in it. The Town agency holds three of the five projects here, including both AvalonBay phases. Neither village has an agency of its own (ledger).

A school district gets notice and nothing else. Under GML §859-a an agency must mail the district clerk and the superintendent before granting more than $100,000 of assistance and hold a public hearing, and under GML §874(4)(b) it must notify them when it departs from its own policy. Neither gives the district a vote.

On whether the impact on everyone else gets measured, the state has already answered once. Auditing the Town of Hempstead IDA over the Green Acres Mall in 2017, the State Comptroller reported that "The TOHIDA Board had not developed policies and procedures assessing the indirect tax impact of PILOTs" (ledger). That indirect impact is the $590 at the top of this page. The finding is nine years old and describes that agency's policies at that time.

The same filing runs back to 2017. All eight years are printed here, because four of them tell a tidier story than the file supports.

The State reports these amounts to the cent, and each column here is rounded to the dollar on its own. In 2018, 2020 and 2021 the exempted and paid columns above therefore differ by one dollar from the net column beside them. The net column is the correct rounding of the exact difference, and the cents are in the ledger.

Net shifted peaked in 2020 at $5,612,088 and now sits at $4,542,118, 19.1% below the peak, with school tax exempted 13.6% below it and school payments collected up 41.4% since 2017. Two honest qualifications. The series is not monotone: it rose from 2023 to 2024. And it is not like-for-like, because the number of projects filing moved from six to four and back to five as two projects rolled off and one arrived, so part of the decline is composition rather than changed terms (ledger). The exposure is large and below its peak, and recovery is improving. That is what the file shows.

For fiscal years ending in 2024, the Nassau County IDA and the Hempstead IDA together net $72.56 million a year of school tax shifted, across 243 projects in that one year, measured on amounts actually paid rather than amounts due. The Glen Cove IDA adds a further $5.15 million, carried separately rather than folded in, so the $72.56 million stays one consistent pair of agencies (ledger).

Every dollar of that is a shift inside a school district, never revenue to one. It lands on every Nassau district that hosts a project, which is why this belongs beside the rest of the agenda rather than in a Rockville Centre footnote. This page prints no per-district count, and cannot: the filings name a city, not a school district, so nothing in the data maps a project to the district that carries its shift. That is precisely what ask 1 below would fix.

Measured district by district instead of applied as one countywide average, the parcel-weighted figure is about $125 a year, about $10 a month, on the average class-1 home in the 51 districts the method covers, which hold 367,826 of the county's 387,867 class-1 parcels; 34 of those districts carry any of this shift. An earlier estimate of $139 applied Rockville Centre's own 74.05% class-1 share to the whole county; the district-by-district figure is lower because the districts carrying the most shifted dollars, Valley Stream 30 and Uniondale among them, carry some of the lowest class-1 shares of their own levy (derivation).

Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions. In that 2024 filing a Rockville Centre home carried more than four times the district-by-district average, $590 against about $125, because five projects sit in one small district. And while this district's own exposure is falling, 19% below its 2020 peak, the county's is rising: the two agencies shifted $50.0 million in the 2017 filing and $72.6 million in the 2024 one, a 45% increase, while the number of projects fell from 249 to 243. The same money is going to fewer, larger deals.

Geography matters too, because the Town of Hempstead IDA can only abate inside its own town. A Town of Hempstead homeowner carries roughly $94 a year from that agency plus about $87 from the county agency. A North Hempstead or Oyster Bay homeowner carries only the county agency's share.

By school district. The county figures above are one average. Measured district by district, the ten districts carrying the most shifted school tax and the ten carrying the most per class-1 home are different lists, because the size of a district's shift and the size of its class-1 base move independently (ledger, ledger).

Full table, all districts: shift by district (CSV) · per home by district (JSON).

None of the four is asserted anywhere on this site. They are listed because they gate the table above, and a reader is owed the open items alongside the closed ones.

1. The assessment roll and the state filing do not reconcile on dollars. Seven parcels in this district carry the IDA exemption code, and the roll shows their school taxable value at exactly zero, which corroborates that they pay no school tax (ledger). The dollar amounts do not corroborate. Converting the roll's 1,424,783 of assessed value at the district's residual class 2 through 4 school rate gives about $7.99 million against the filing's $5,866,234, a gap of $2,125,659 (derivation). Two things the gap is not. It is not missing projects: the seven roll parcels map exactly onto the five filed ones. And it is not undifferentiated: Rock 50 alone is $509,158 of it, about a quarter, because it files $0 against a parcel the roll shows fully exempt. What would settle the rest: the county's per-parcel exemption dollar amounts, which Nassau does not populate in the state feed.

2. Whether the Banks Avenue payment agreement has already ended, and what the new one replaces it with. The 2026 end year in the table is a self-reported field, and the same filing under-reports at least one project's school benefit by about $509,000 (item 1). The district has since said more. On September 8, 2026 the district's finance office told this project that the larger of the two AvalonBay agreements, worth about $760,000 a year in direct revenue to the district, ended in the 2025-26 school year, and that a new agreement at a different property, worth about $421,000 a year to the district, was recently approved with revenue starting in 2026-27. Those are the district's figures for revenue it receives, which is not the same measure as the school payment in lieu of taxes reported in the state filing above, so the two must not be netted against each other. What would settle it: the executed payment schedules from the Town of Hempstead IDA, and the resolution and hearing record for the new project, by records request.

3. The current legal names of the five sponsors. The names in the table are the names as filed with the agency, which can lag an assignment or a sale. What would settle it: the Department of State entity records read against the executed agreements.

4. Whether this district was noticed in 2007, and whether it objected. GML §859-a requires an agency, before providing more than $100,000 of assistance, to deliver its project resolution to the school district clerk and the district superintendent, and to hold a public hearing with notice to each affected taxing jurisdiction (ledger). So a record exists. What would settle it: that notice and hearing record, from both agencies, by records request. Whether the answer is "the district objected and lost" or "the board of the day supported it" changes what there is to ask for.

Four asks on abatements, none of which moves a dollar or reopens a signed contract. All four are transparency and process, and every one generalizes to any district that hosts a project. A fourth request, on a different subject, is listed here because it is the other number a board would need and nobody publishes it either.

1. Publish the cost benefit analysis. An agency prepares a cost benefit analysis of a project before it grants assistance. Publish it, per project, at the time of the vote and again at any renewal or extension. The premise of every one of these agreements is that the building does not go up without the break. The oldest of these was approved in 2007 and the second largest in 2015, well into the recovery. Nassau house prices rose roughly elevenfold in the thirty years before the first of them, and about 61% again since. Nobody outside the agency can see what was weighed, and the State Comptroller found in 2017 that one of these two boards was not weighing the cost to everyone else at all (ledger).

2. Publish the ledger. Each industrial development agency publishes, once a year and per project, the school tax forgone and the school payment received, sorted by school district. Two agencies operate here: the Nassau County IDA and the Town of Hempstead IDA. GML §859-a already puts the individual project resolution in front of the district clerk and the superintendent. What no one publishes is the running total, sorted the way a school board actually needs it. The State's own dataset cannot be sorted that way either, because it records a city and not a district.

3. Put the district's position on the record. The Board of Education records its position on every new abatement over $100,000 in a public board minute. It costs the district nothing, it takes one vote, and it creates in advance the record that is missing for 2007.

4. Ask the district before the vote, and publish the answer. Today the school district gets notice and no veto: GML §874(4)(b) requires certified mail or a read receipt to the clerk and the superintendent when an agency departs from its own exemption policy, and grants no approval power (ledger). An agency could write a district sign-off into its own uniform tax exemption policy, though whether a board may bind its own discretion that way is a legal question this page does not answer. The narrower version needs no legal question answered at all: publish the district's written response alongside the deviation resolution, before the vote.

5. One request to the school district, on a separate question. Publish instructional full-time-equivalent staff per pupil against the Nassau County median, once a year, alongside the budget. Per-pupil spending is published and is the wrong denominator for a staffing question, because it carries debt service, transport, pension and out-of-district tuition. The district can produce the right one. The argument it would settle runs every budget season and never resolves. The superintendent has said in public that Rockville Centre is "higher staffed in terms of teachers than about 75 percent of the districts in the county" (Voices); the 2026-27 budget then cut 22 teaching positions and 40 teaching assistants (ledger). A resident cannot check either statement, so the board's account of why it had to cut and the resident's question about what the district spends never meet. One published series answers three things at once: whether the district sits where its own superintendent says it sits, whether this year's cuts moved it toward the county median or past it, and whether staffing is tracking an enrollment fall of 8.6 percent over six years (ledger). It would defend the budget at least as often as it challenges it.